Adults and children spontaneously produce
gestures while they speak, and such gestures appear to support and expand
on the information communicated by the verbal channel. Little research,
however, has been carried out to examine the role played by gesture in
the listener's representation of accumulating information? Do listeners
attend to the gestures that accompany narrative speech? In what kinds of
relationships between gesture and speech do listeners attend to the gestural
channel? If listeners do attend to information received in gesture, how
is this information represented—is it 'tagged' as originating in the gestural
channel? In this article research is described that addresses these questions.
Results show that listeners do attend to information conveyed in gesture,
when that information supplements or even contradicts the information conveyed
by speech. And information received via gesture is available for retelling
in speech. These results are taken to demonstrate that gesture is not taken
by the listener to be epiphenomenal to the act of speaking, or a simple
manual translation of speech. But they also suggest that the information
conveyed in a discourse may be represented in a manner that is neither
gesture norlanguage, although accessible to both
channels.